Professional Audio Services for Classical and Acoustic Music

Classical musicians are accustomed to performing in reverberant spaces, and indeed reverberation is an important part of the finished sound. Performers subconsciously tailor their phrasing and tempo to match their environment and the real sound of a real room is far superior to what can be achieved with artificial reverberation heard through headphones. Nothing beats the real thing, and having all these factors working together harmoniously makes for a much more authentic and pleasing result. With this in mind, consider what a skilled and experienced specialist in location recording can do for your CD, or Web distributed commercial release.

Southern Ontario is home to a wealth of spectacular sounding performance spaces - churches and concert halls. It’s not uncommon for a performing organization to have a connection with a performance space already, and there are many benefits to be gained from recording where things are familiar. For one thing, more control over the sound of the performance stays in the hands of the performers, rather than being artificially manipulated to compensate for the shortcomings of an acoustically dead studio. Why travel to perform in an unfamiliar environment, possibly to perform on an unfamiliar instrument, when the recording studio can come to you?

Any time you’d like your performance recorded, Lockwood ARS can provide top quality audio capture with minimal intrusion or distraction for the audience. In a lot of cases, a single tall microphone stand with a pair of microphones is placed just in front of the performers. Special circumstances, such as a very deep stage or widely distributed performers, may require additional microphones but can easily be accommodated.

Recording is made to a computer workstation, capable of multi-track recording. In many cases, a finished CD with edited and faded beginnings and endings can be provided within an hour of the concert’s completion.

Older recordings can be marred by hiss, hum, clicks, LP surface noise or other sonic degradation. Recordings made with portable devices like iPhones are often veiled by excessive hiss and distorted by the microphone's frequency response being tailored to enhance the clarity of speech, while making music sound tinny and scratchy. Even new recordings can be interrupted by traffic noises, cel phones, coughs, baby cries or other intrusions. All can benefit from having the unwanted elements removed or reduced, allowing the performance to be experienced to its full potential.

This precise audio "surgery" insures that what is desired is left intact. Subtle details can be rescued and a realistic ambience can be restored to recordings that in former times would have been written off as being hopelessly unsalvageable.

The image above is a spectrogram display showing a brief pause between two phrases in a choral performance. You can see the change before and after the removal of a room noise that disrupted the musical flow.

Listen to this example of the pause between two phrases in a choir performance. Notice the loud "clunk" before, and its absence after. It could have been a cough, a chair squeak, a car...

Recording sessions frequently result in several “takes” which need to be edited together, so that the best possible performance is what is offered to the public. Editing music requires a specialist’s touch, provided by someone who is sensitive to the subtle nuances of phrasing and tempo, so that the edited joins are imperceptible. With over twenty-five years experience, Frank Lockwood has refined his skills to provide you with the cleanest, most musical editing available.

Editing can be performed on stereo or multi-track recordings - where the benefit is to maintain the maximum amount of flexibility for balance adjustments, right through to the final stages of mix-down and mastering.

In most cases, editing is part of a complete recording project package, but perhaps you already have a concert/recital recording from which you would like to extract certain sections, or just remove long pauses and walk-ons. Have you got several versions of the same music, and would like to combine the best parts from all of them? Have you got a collection of recordings from various performances that you would like combined onto a single CD for audition or grant application purposes? Have you got a recording where one or two missed notes are driving you crazy - you might be amazed to discover just what is possible.

This is the last chance to make changes before committing to manufacturing a run of CDs, or placing your tracks on the internet for distribution to the public. Whether proceeding from edited session material, or taking a concert recording and applying the final polish, there are many fine adjustments that can be made in terms of volume, tonal quality, and the reduction of intrusive noises that will enhance and refine your project, achieving the full realization of your hard work and artistic vision.

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Lockwood ARS is owned and operated by Frank Lockwood, who has over 25 years experience providing professional classical music recording, audio editing, mixing, mastering and noise reduction/audio restoration services to musicians and record labels throughout Canada and the United States.

Location recording sessions, recital and concert recordings, grant application and audition recordings and other audio recording services can be scheduled throughout the Greater Toronto Area and southern Ontario.